It is widely accepted that the Bush administration is nothing if not on message. Since the incursion in Iraq, the administration has shown at least one foolish consistency that is, to say the least, problematic. Whenever the president or his aides and advisors refer to attacks against American soldiers in Iraq, they refer to them as acts of terrorism and to the perpetrators as terrorists.* But by any standard definition of terrorism, the administration is misusing the word. This is not a simple matter of semantics. It is also a matter that is central to our developing a coherent, rational, and consistent policy toward terrorism and other forms of warfare. Terrorism is the intentional targeting of civilian populations. Attacking soldiers, or police who are functioning in a military capacity, is not terrorism.

At first the insistence upon conflating acts of terrorism with other attacks may not seem to be problematic -- after all, the individual using a car as a bomb at a military checkpoint is one of the bad guys. So too is the suicide bomber in a café. Why not just lump them all together and let God sort it out?

While viscerally satisfying and perhaps in its way logical, the fact remains that an inability to separate different types of attacks, different kinds of enemies, reveals a myopia on the part of the administration, and this could, down the road, manifest itself in shoddy policy and worse.

In the early 1960s, in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in which members of the South African Police forces opened fire on a crowd of black protesters from the Pan Africanist Congress, killing 69 and wounding dozens more, anti-apartheid activists faced a dilemma. In the face of a state that clearly was not going to be transformed by nonviolent moral suasion, was it acceptable to resort to violence against the State? The answer that Nelson Mandela and others came up with was that as a last resort such an approach was justifiable, and, indeed, necessary.

However, in establishing an armed wing of the African National Congress, Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), the ANC did not act blithely. Instead, Mandela was clear to differentiate between four types of violent reprisal: terrorism, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and all-out revolution. Basing their decisions on both moral reasoning and realities on the ground - namely the fear of all-out racial civil war - the ANC strategists behind the shift in policy decided to limit their attacks to sabotage - that is, they established the proviso that they would not aim to kill or hurt people, and they would aim for targets that would pressure whites to push for changes in apartheid policy.

Why does this matter? Because today the Bush administration is too quick to label anything violent aimed at any American (or, where it suits us, allied) interests as "terrorist." This simply does not hold up to scrutiny. There are times when acts of sabotage or guerrilla warfare are necessary, just, and right. One need look no further than the struggle against apartheid. But too many in the administration have not taken the time or effort to establish parameters for what "terrorism" means. Until the administration and others in a position to make policy are willing to establish and accept that terrorism is the intentional targeting of civilian populations, they will run the risk of developing as national policy an approach whereby "terrorism" comes to mean whatever we want it to mean. This is the sort of relativism that conservatives usually deride, and yet let there be no mistake, relativism it is.

Furthermore, one should not fall into the trap of believing that by establishing definitions of terrorism we are allowing bad guys who use other means to go unpunished. Presumably we will not lose our moral compass by developing a more complex view of things. We can still fight evil when it comes in the guise of sabotage, guerrilla warfare, or revolution. The difference is that terrorism is inherently evil, where these other acts are not of themselves evil, and thus our recourse in responding to each may well be different. If nothing else, from a strategic vantage point this should make us more efficient at (and possibly moral in) dealing with our enemies, not less so.

Finally, if we refuse to acknowledge that there can be attacks against us other than terrorist attacks, then we inadvertently will push our enemies into acts of terrorism. After all, if the United States is unwilling to accept the difference, then why should those who oppose us? Beyond that, if every kind of act of violence used against us is terrorism, if it is all relative, then doesn't the opposite also hold true - that any act of violence that we use is also terrorism? And if so, will that not have an impact on our ability to use the military to protect ourselves, to intervene in humanitarian crises, and to serve our national interest?

We can never accept terrorism, and we can never accept such morally vacuous platitudes as "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." But Nelson Mandela and others were willing to make these differentiations, were willing to fight for freedom and avoid widespread terrorism, no matter what the self-serving apartheid government proclaimed throughout the 1980s. They faced a government that similarly referred to any opposition as terrorism. Are we apartheid South Africa? Of course not. But in its brazen misuse of language our current "antiterror" approach is remarkably akin to that skunk of a regime. On this issue we can do better than that South African government, and by establishing clear cut differences between terrorists and other fighters, we shall.

*In Iraq U.S. generals have occasionally referred to the attacks on American troops as the work of guerrilla forces.